The stories we really need now
The divided internet, conspiracy theories, and myths that matter
When a writer sets out an argument I’ve been making, and discussing, at the dinner table for months, and does it better than I would have, all I can say is thank you. Today’s “American Folklore” by The Bulwark’s Jonathan V Last (known as JVL), which I hope you’ll read in full, is one of those. It also led me back to a 1982 cover story in Foreign Affairs, “The Care and Repair of Public Myth,” by the world historian William H McNeill, a dear friend you’ve probably heard me talk about before, and I want to share a bit of each.
First, JVL:
The dream of the internet was that it would create a high-information, high-trust society. Technology was supposed to make facts and primary sources immediately available to everyone, thereby ushering in an age of rationality and data-driven decision-making.
If you lived in Bumblefuck, Missouri, the internet meant that you were no longer beholden to the limited stream of news provided by your local paper, three broadcast networks, and assorted cable news players. You’d be able to see the information with your own eyes.
A Senate committee issued an important report? A scientific journal published a landmark study? You’d be able to sit in your living room and pull up the actual study or report and read it yourself, from soup to nuts. Your local newspaper might run a 600-word story about a speech some politician gave. The internet meant that you could watch the entire speech, unfiltered, and draw your own conclusions.
Instead of relying on a small number of information gatekeepers, you now had direct access to data. So you no longer had to rely on what the media told you about, say, crime. You could pull up the FBI crime stats and look at the numbers with your own eyes.
But it hasn’t worked out that way.
The internet has made all of that data readily available to people. And it turns out that often there is too much of it and it is too complicated for normal non-experts to understand. But the bigger problem has been the sheer volume of noise that the internet gave rise to. The noise overwhelmed the information, accelerating the decline in trust in institutions. The net effect was to make the populace as a whole less tethered to facts and data—and more animated by folk stories and something like an oral tradition.
Read the rest (it’s a paid subscriber post but you can probably get a free trial and if you can afford it I encourage you to subscribe to The Bulwark - lots of great coverage of US politics, if that’s your bag).
And here is Bill McNeill, no paywall (but of course I’ll be glad to have you subscribe to this publication). The extract below sets out an important point about the power of myth:
Myths, moreover, are based on faith more than on fact. Their truth is usually proven only by the action they provoke. In 1940, for example, when Hitler had defeated France, the British public continued to support war against Germany partly because they "knew" from schoolbook history that in European wars their country lost all the early battles and always won the last. This faith, together with a strong sense of the general righteousness of their cause, and fear of what defeat would bring, made it possible for them to persist in waging war until myth became fact once more in 1945.
Clearly, without British actions in 1940, World War II would have followed a far different course. Russian and American resources might never have coalesced with Britain's to create the victorious Grand Alliance of 1945. Germany, in short, might have won. Yet no merely rational calculation of relative strengths and military capabilities in June 1940 would have supported the proposition that Great Britain could expect to defeat Hitler. Action, irrational in the short run, proved rational in the longer run. Myth is what bridged the gap, remaking the reality of June 1940 into the reality of May 1945.
You can read the entire essay: at the Berkshire website by clicking here or, if you are a subscriber to Foreign Affairs, here. I’d include the whole thing here but it’s 5,000 words, more than Substack allows.
This is serious reading, perhaps not exactly what we want for Christmas. But the world isn’t going to stop for two weeks and it lifts my spirits to see people working to understand how things have gone so badly awry. Bill also wrote about what we need to do in the final lines of his long essay.
In brief, he was saying that scholars debunked old beliefs without offering coherent replacements, and thus contributed to a dangerous state of affairs for societies and the global community. He concludes, “Inherited ideas – whether dating back to pagan Greece, Christian Europe, 1776 or 1848 – are simply inadequate, and there is no use pretending otherwise. There is still less sense in pretending that all we need is more detail. What we need is an intelligible world, and to make the world intelligible, generalization is necessary. Our academic historians have not done well in providing such generalizations of late. Thoughtful men [and of course, as Bill would acknowledge, women] of letters ought therefore to try.”
